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Meetings: Drudgery or Delight?

Most of the time when we think of meetings they take the roll of a necessary evil in our lives, like taxes, and Simon Cowell. I’ve read & researched a lot on meetings: how to have effective, organized, exciting meetings that people actually want to come to. I wouldn’t say that I have achieved nirvanic meeting skills, but I try – and I’m learning more each week. We tweaked our Creative Arts meeting a little more this week. This is what it looks like now:

Usually on Sunday night or Monday (when things are fresh) I write up and agenda of items to discuss, including follow up items from the previous week’s meeting.

I email the agenda to our Music Director and Creative Arts Director so that they can digest some of this info before the meeting. I include our Audio Engineer and Tech Director in this email (they are volunteers so they can’t always make the meetings).

Our meeting is the last in a succession of meetings on Tuesday – so there are usually a couple extra items to add to our agenda by the time we get to meet (usually right after lunch).

We begin our meeting by spending time in prayer for direction, wisdom, and we pray for each member of the Creative Arts team (band, tech, etc.).

We go over our agenda and try and stay focused on hitting each point and coming to a conclusion, or finding a solution. We get sidetracked now and again – I think being too rigid leads to less participation.

I allow my directors to bring up any issues that they may have on their hearts or minds.

Then we move to planning the weekend services, using the message theme as a launch pad.

I always open up planningcenteronline.com so we can see what we’ve done in the past weeks, and what lies ahead. (This is a super huge blessing, if you are not using something like this you are really missing out).

Sometimes our songs are already planned because we planned them in advance, if not we begin talking through what songs would be a good fit for the message, what keys work well, who is singing/playing (scheduling the band) – how the service will flow, etc.

When we land on a song, we play through it together just on acoustic guitars, just to make sure we are very familiar with it and that the keys will work. Then when we are comfortable with the choice, we put it in the schedule. This goes on until all the songs are chosen and we feel confident that the set will work well and is God-inspired.

Then we usually talk about how the stage will look: lighting, props, risers, people placement, etc.

This usually leads into a discussion on scheduling the tech team.

We try and schedule in time to discuss a book or magazine, watch a video, listen to new music, or just do something to keep us plugged into what is going on and how to stay fresh.

When we nail all these areas, this meeting usually takes 2-3 hours (ouch!).

I send out a follow up email with “action points” on who committed to what and kind of like a final “to do” list.

Sometimes we have special guest, from marketing people, design people, etc. Just depends on what we are doing.

Here’s what I see after looking over that list:

We need to spend a good amount of time talking about transitions, from song to song, from song to video, from video to speaking, from whatever to whatever – we’ve got to start nailing these better.

I hope this meeting is not boring or too tedious (I mean it is work!).

I wish I had a giant whiteboard.

I wish I could get an iced caramel-machiato (sugar free & non-fat) for each meeting.

I wish we could be productive without meetings.

I wish I could get Macbook Pro’s for my team.

I wish we could take better notes and follow through and hold each other accountable better.

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One thought on “Meetings: Drudgery or Delight?”

Man I really appreciate this article on meetings. I’m bringing along a new worship leader in our student services and this will be great to a pass along to him. The worship mag/articles in the previous post too!